Sixty students. One formula car. Seventeen weeks.

UCT Racing — also written FSA UCT — is the Formula Student team at the University of Cape Town. Around sixty students, from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and business, design and build a single-seat racing car, then take it to be judged and raced against other university teams.

Formula Student is not only a race. Teams are assessed on the engineering behind the car, on what it costs to build, and on the business case for building it at all. Four of our eleven sub-teams are business, not engineering.

A season like this puts a degree to work rather than setting it aside. A tolerance or a circuit that a student first meets in a lecture theatre gets handed to the rest of the team, who have to build around it, argue with it and answer for it in front of a judge rather than a mark sheet. That is about as close as most engineering students get, before they graduate, to running on a real project team, where mechanical answers to electrical and both answer to a cost report, all of it working against one date nobody can move. What that builds, in skill and in the people a student meets doing it, tends to matter well past this one competition.

Formula Student Africa runs for the first time in 2026. It is also the first competition this team has entered.